Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009
by Jonathan Klate
The downsides of aging are painfully obvious. Physical capacity inexorably diminishes. Bellies soften. Lower limbs gradually crumble. Some things dry out while others clog up. Details once easily remembered slip from an ever more porous mind.
And that's the easy stuff. Truly catastrophic time bombs tick ominously. We wait with trepidation for awful news, and shudder in sympathy as friends our age contend with the predicaments in which we timorously expect to find ourselves some dark day.
Is there any upside to the aging process? Can it be that the human life cycle might be structured so as to encourage the unfolding of surprising and welcome qualities as we mature into advanced years?
I have, to my own astonishment, been discovering something marvelous spontaneously emerging here that I scarcely expected, and toward which no elder gestured when I was young.
One sweet autumn afternoon I was jogging beneath the overarching limbs of beeches and poplars along a secluded country lane in a sleepy hill town in western Massachusetts. Shafts of sunlight filtered through the mosaic canopy overhead, dappling the honey-colored dirt of the road with a playful shadow dance. A breeze now and then would lift some branches, exposing the glistening multi-colored undersides of myriad shuffling leaves. I felt like I was floating beneath a luminous whirlpool and found myself gasping in awe at the sudden chaotic sparkling panoply of yellow, orange, red, and green.
I happened to be listening on my iPod to a masterful performance of Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor performed by Itzhak Perlman and the Philadelphia Orchestra. As the Allegro Molto Appassionato crescendoed, it felt as if a knot that I had not known was tied inside my heart loosened and then fell apart. I nearly wept, or maybe did a little, not in sorrow but in transcendent joy. As tears welled, a smile softened the creases of my face, and a wave of climactic laughter heaved my chest.
I slowed to a walk and watched, listened, and sighed my way through a cascading outflow of feelings far too sublime to adequately craft into words. Life seemed all at once so utterly beautiful, so achingly sad, so abundant with possibility. I felt a deep recognition that I am, and that each of us is, part of this mad, infinite, splendorous dance, all arising and passing away. Like the music, like the leaves, like these thoughts, like our lives-not ours at all, but features of the inconceivably immense cosmic drama. Such a rush of epiphanies encouraged by sunlight, autumn leaves, a gentle breeze, and a radiant concerto!
I recall when I was a child driving in the country with my family in October. Now and then my mother would smile with delight as she pointed out the window to a particularly brilliant oak or maple by the roadside. I would think, "A tree. Looks kinda pretty. What's the big deal?"
And I have listened to this same piece of music dozens of times, enjoyed it, and thought I'd listened well. But now, sometimes, I hear with ears, heart, mind, and spirit open to the surging possibilities of enchantment that I feel the composer, in his genius, must have intended for us to know. But in my younger years, I was not quite able to absorb all its layered magic.
As the mind opens to the fullness of beauty, the heart opens to the hearts of others. The awareness ripens that our life does not sustain itself in isolation, but has its minute special radiance in the incredible interdependent wholeness of the light-filled cosmos. The sufferings, joys, struggles, and triumphs of others become our intimate concern, as the universe and our own little souls interpenetrate. And so, if we encourage it, compassion increasingly animates our days. By self-transcendence we lose something of ourselves and grow, paradoxically, spiritually richer.
Perhaps some rare fortunate ones among us may live their whole lives awakened to this grace of being. These I guess would be our high artists, our healers, our saints if there be such. For the rest of us, this aesthetic sensitivity and this compassionate consciousness can be cultivated, and with practice, although they may take years to ripen, blossom as the surprising gifts of maturity. As this happens we grow into a fuller actualization of our birthright as human beings, with vitalized sentience and empathy.
So while I wistfully watch the hard-bodied younger folks gambol around the park, I do not envy them their everything. I stroll more slowly along the path, but I see more deeply into life, hear more, and feel more, than at their age I could possibly have imagined. They would not guess it, but I know some secrets now that life will whisper to them in time, if they learn to pay attention well, as the leaves of their lives turn. And I am forever grateful for the gift of autumn, well earned.
Dr. Jonathan Klate resides in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he practices traditional acupuncture and Chinese medicine and writes frequently about spiritual consciousness, progressive political ideology, and the relationship between these two.
